Only time will tell

 by Jeffrey Archer. *Starred Review* Archer introduces an ambitious new historical series, the Clifton Chronicles, and a compelling new character. The series will cover an entire century, but this volume spans two decades, 1920-40. Its central character is young Bristol lad Harry Clifton, fatherless and living in near-poverty conditions, who thanks to the sacrifices of his devoted mother winds up at Oxford University. It sounds like a simple enough story, but Archer, no stranger to thematic complexity, packs the novel with intrigue, mystery, and heartrending revelations. He also tells the tale in a slightly unconventional manner, eschewing straight chronology and devoting sections to several of the main characters Harry, Harry's mother, and a powerful businessman with ties to Harry's family, among others and examining the same period of time through each of the character's eyes. Slowly, like a jigsaw puzzle assembling itself, an entirely different story emerges, one involving Harry's father and the mystery of his sudden disappearance years earlier. What appears at the outset to be a straightforward coming-of-age tale becomes, by the end, a saga of power, betrayal, and bitter hatred. The novel ends on a deliberately dark note, setting the stage for the sequel. Archer is known for thrillers, and while this has some thriller elements, it will also appeal to mainstream historical-fiction fans. An outstanding effort from a reliable veteran. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A new series from the perennially best-selling Archer is big news, and St. Martin's will be trumpeting the story at top volume. A 250,000 first printing will provide a well-stocked supply line for hungry fans. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

Gunfight : the battle over the right to bear arms in America

 by Adam Winkler. Winkler, a professor of constitutional law at UCLA, mines 400 years of debate over gun control in America to analyze the Supreme Court's landmark 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller in this timely and persuasive history. Dismissing the extremist "gun nuts" and "gun grabbers" who have dominated the gun debate for decades, the author clearly shows that the right to bear arms and gun control have always coexisted in the U.S.-even on the frontier where guns and gun regulation were widespread. The brainchild of a pair of libertarian lawyers, the Heller case revolved around the District of Columbia's total ban on handguns and the contention of Heller's lawyers that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual's right to own guns. Clearly mirroring the impasse over the issue, it offered the courts a rare opportunity to point toward a historically valid compromise position. In 2008, after five years of dramatic litigation, the Supreme Court struck down D.C.'s handgun ban and recognized the plaintiffs' individual rights theory while still noting that many forms of gun control are constitutional. In the tradition of 1976's Simple Justice and 1964's Gideon's Trumpet, Winkler skillfully weaves together history and contemporary jurisprudence to explore a contentious issue of constitutional interpretation. --Publishers Weekly (Check Catalog)

A most unsuitable match

 by Stephanie Grace Whitson. Fannie Rousseau is jolted out of her grief-stricken stupor by three nearly simultaneous discoveries: her financial advisor is not to be trusted; her house has become so rundown that a burglar thought it unoccupied; and her mother had a long-estranged twin, last heard from in Montana. Needing to do something in the face of her perceived helplessness to restore the family fortunes other than by marrying a man she detests, she and her beloved maid, Hannah, embark on a steamboat journey upriver in search of Aunt Edith, her only living relative. Along the way they meet Sam Beck, searching for his runaway sister, and a roustabout named Lamar Davis, who helps Sam understand the Bible that was his legacy from his mother. Whitson's historical Christian romance offers action-packed adventure coupled with coming-of-age stories for both Sam and Fannie, along with a fascinating glimpse of the dangers of travel along Old Misery (the Missouri River) and life in a frontier trading post. --Booklist (Check catalog)

Class warfare : inside the fight to fix America's schools

 by Steven Brill. Good teaching really does matter. Success doesn't depend on a school's location or budget; it comes down to the person standing in front of the classroom. CourtTV and The American Lawyer magazine founder Brill (After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era) has concluded that teachers willing to extend their efforts beyond the classroom, to spend extra time with their students and their students' families, and to do all they can to connect with their charges are key to turning around the American education system. However, there are obstacles to overcome, including unions' destructive demands, the problems that arise when teachers' longevity trumps talent, the stigma charter schools sometimes face, and political agendas that fail to put children first. Horror stories about good teachers who are disparaged and bad teachers who are coddled might make you cringe, but Brill's multilayered account of the education dilemma also brings hope that change for the better could be on the horizon. Verdict Many parents, even those who are educators, may not be aware of the battles that occur daily in the education world. This is a fascinating look at those struggles and at the people who determine how America's children will be educated. --Library Journal (Check catalog)

The submission

 by Amy Waldman. *Starred Review* After venomous deliberations over anonymous design submissions for a 9/11 memorial at ground zero, the jury selects an elegant garden as the ideal embodiment of remembrance and rebirth. But when the identity of the architect is revealed Mohammad Khan, the American son of Muslim immigrants from India the dream of national healing warps into a hysterical nightmare. As public outrage ignites, entangled characters struggle with anger, fear, conscience, and ambition. Mohammad, called Mo, is stubborn and aloof. Journalist Alyssa is desperate to capitalize on the excoriating scandal. Down-and-out Sean, who lost his firefighter brother, flounders as spokesperson for the victims' families, while two young 9/11 widows Claire, wealthy and glamorous, and Asma, an illegal immigrant from Bangladesh push through grief to try to do the right thing. In her magnetizing first novel, replete with searing insights and exquisite metaphors, Waldman, formerly a New York Times reporter and co-chief of the South Asia bureau, maps shadowy psychological terrain and a vast social minefield as conflicted men and women confront life-and-death moral quandaries within the glare and din of a media carnival. Waldman brilliantly delineates the legacy of 9/11; the confluence of art, religion, and politics; the plexus between the individual and the group; and the glory of transcendent empathy in The Bonfire of the Vanities for our time. -Booklist (Check Catalog)

The gift of an ordinary day : a mother's memoir

 by Katrina Kenison. In this uplifting narrative of midlife and mothering, former Best American Short Stories editor Kenison inspires those going through their own midlife upheavals to savor each moment of family life, the ordinary moments that can be so fulfilling if we are wholly present. In the wake of lost jobs, put-off dreams, changing relationships with her mate, and the trials of mothering teenage boys, Kenison manages to stay sane by doing just that. A lovely memoir, of special interest to women struggling with midlife issues. --Library Journal (Check Catalog)

Everything beautiful began after : a novel

 by Simon Van Booy. Crimson-haired Rebecca has left behind a job at Air France and a life that's stuttering out like a candle to settle in Athens and work at becoming a painter, drawing on the memory of the mother who abandoned her and her sister as children. Socially maladapted, relentlessly soused, but indisputably brilliant-he breezed through college early after lonely years at a New England boarding school-George is in Athens to perfect his grasp of ancient languages. Rebecca falls carelessly into a brief affair with George but takes up passionately with Henry, a charismatic if troubled archaeologist in Athens on a dig. Then Henry unknowingly befriends George, and together they end up working together on the dig. But this is no idyll; the dark backstories crafted for each character by first novelist Van Booy (Love Begins in Winter) presage a crushing tragedy that changes the landscape of their lives forever. VERDICT Readers who like to zip through the pages might find this precious or overextended, but those with a little patience will be taken in by the carefully etched stories and lyrically precise and inventive language. A lovely book for sophisticated readers. --Library Journal (Check Catalog)

Telling memories among Southern women : domestic workers and their employers in the segregated South

 by Susan Tucker.  Tucker explores the complex relationships between servants and their employers, also treated by Judith Rollins in Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers (CH, Feb '86), Daniel E. Sutherland in Americans and Their Servants: Domestic Service in the United States from 1890 to 1920 (1981), and David M. Katzman in Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (CH, Feb '79). Tucker's contribution to this historiography is a study of that relationship as it is complicated by southern racial ideas. The book is a collection of edited transcripts of interviews with black domestics and white women who employed black domestics. The interviews are divided by subject into five parts and an epilogue. Tucker maintains that black domestics played a unique role as go-between in a segregated society. Her record of their memories and perceptions, as well as the memories of those in whose houses they worked, will be useful for anyone seeking to understand more about women's or southern history. --Choice (Check Catalog)

The little bride

 by Anna Solomon. Late 1880s Russia offers few choices for 16-year-old Minna Losk. Her mother deserts the family, then her father dies in a mine accident. She wants to be a bookkeeper, but her aunts send her out as a servant to a marriage broker for Jewish men. Soon Minna leaves the hopelessness, the pogroms, and the poverty for a farm in South Dakota, where, as a mail-order bride, she receives an unfriendly welcome from her husband-to-be. Max is a rough man much older than she expected, with two sons her own age. The house is a primitive sod hut carved out of the hillside with no running water. Their cow wanders up on the grass roof, and the house collapses, forcing them to accept charity from their prosperous neighbors. In despair, Minna feels that Max doesn't want her, that she's not what he paid for, and now she's romantically involved with his oldest son. VERDICT Solomon writes unsparingly of the harsh realities that women like Minna faced on the American frontier. Although the concluding chapters seem rushed, most readers will feel compelled to stay with this page-turner to its solemn finish. A strong debut novel, highly recommended for those who appreciate exceptional historical fiction. --Library Journal (Check Catalog)

Beverley Nichols : a life

 by Bryan Connon. Handsome, urbane, and multitalented, Nichols has emerged as one of the most enduring garden writers of the previous century. Curious readers who have just discovered the reprinted Merry Hall trilogy will relish Connon's candid look at the man who is perhaps best remembered for these charming books. In a convincing and copiously researched biography, Connon establishes the fact that a survey of Nichols' impressive vita, encompassing journalist, novelist, playwright, satirist, and musical composer, cannot begin to reveal the true identity of this complicated twentieth-century Renaissance man. Mercurial in his likes and dislikes, Nichols often executed remarkable professional turnabouts. In 1944, for instance, he followed his nonfiction work, Verdict in India, with the very popular children's book The Tree That Sat Down. Expect fans to ask for this fascinating portrayal of Nichols' life and times, with its continuous procession of celebrities and bon vivants. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

This beautiful life : a novel

 by Helen Shulman. With one mouse-click, 15-year-old Jake, beloved son of stay-at-home mom Liz and successful self-made man Richard, changes the lives of the happy Bergamot family forever. He forwards a pornographic video created by and featuring Daisy, an eighth-grade girl he rejected at a party, to a friend. The video goes viral, and the repercussions send shockwaves through the family, the cushy NYC private school Jake attends, and the community, all but canceling out the future Liz and Richard envision for not only Jake but also themselves. Set in 2003, the post-9/11, pre-financial-collapse time frame feels oddly like a period of innocence regained, just before the world of upper-middle-class wealth implodes, positioning the Bergamots as a symptom of the oncoming crisis. Schulman subtly explores family and gender dynamics by telling the story through the eyes of Liz, then Jake, then Richard, and eventually, Daisy. She shifts the perspectives expertly while pulling off a striking parable about moral decay, denial, and self-destruction. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

Is marriage for white people? : how the African American marriage decline affects everyone

 by Ralph Richard Banks. Banks, a Stanford law professor, examines why black Americans maintain the lowest marriage and highest divorce rates in the nation, focusing most sharply on the high likelihood a black woman will remain single, a product of the scarcity of black men in the marriage market, their number depleted by high incarceration rates. This "man shortage" leaves those who are available in high demand and with less impetus to commit to one woman. In the U.S., wives earn a larger percentage of the household income than ever and are more likely to have completed college than their husbands. This trend is most acute among African-Americans , which coupled with how African-American women outperform their male counterparts contributes to the high African-American divorce rate. Banks suggests that black women should stop being so willing to "marry down" and consider "marrying out"-marrying nonblack men. Such a choice restores equality to black male and female relationships by depriving black men of the power they enjoy as the result of being scarce commodities. Furthermore, Banks argues provocatively, "for black women, interracial marriage doesn't abandon the race, it serves the race." Peppered with interviews and candid opinions about marriage and relationships, this is a surprisingly intimate scholarly work; the sobering topic is tempered by the author's easy-to-read, captivating style. --Publisher's Weekly (Check Catalog)

The Delta solution : an international thriller

 by Patrick Robinson. Robinson's latest brings back U.S. Navy SEAL Mack Bedford in his most perilous adventure yet. Somali pirates hijack a vessel, and the ransom is steep. The U.S. government decides to secretly pay and free the men and cargo from their captors. Bedford, now an instructor training soldiers who will become the next generation of SEALs, receives an urgent plea to help stop pirate attacks on ships in the future. He takes command of a new team responsible for covert missions to infiltrate future pirated boats. Then the men responsible for the original hijacking take another ship, and the ransom doubles. The third Bedford yarn is the best yet as Robinson juggles a tense thriller and the hard questions raised by a culture that uses piracy to help its citizens. Fans of Stephen Coonts and Dale Brown should line up for this one. --Booklist (Check catalog)

Tomatoland : how modern industrial agriculture destroyed our most alluring fruit

 by Barry Estabrook. In this eye-opening expose, Vermont journalist Estabrook traces the sad, tasteless life of the mass-produced tomato, from its chemical-saturated beginnings in south Florida to far-flung supermarkets. Expanding on his 2010 James Beard Award-winning article in Gourmet magazine, Estabrook first looks at the tomato's ancestors in Peru, grown naturally in coastal deserts and Andean foothills, with fruit the size of large peas. Crossbreeding produced bigger, juicier varieties, and by the late 19th century, Florida had muscled in on the U.S. market, later benefiting from the embargo on Cuban tomatoes; the Sunshine State now produces one-third of the fresh tomatoes in this country. To combat sandy soil devoid of nutrients, and weather that breeds at least 27 insect species and 29 diseases that prey on the plants, Florida growers bombard tomato plants with a dizzying cocktail of herbicides and pesticides, then gas the "mature greens" (fruit plucked so early from the vines that they bounce without a scratch) with ethylene. Behind the scenes, moreover, there exists a horrendous culture of exploitation of Hispanic laborers in places like Immokalee, where pesticide exposure has led to birth defects and long-term medical ailments. Estabrook concludes this thought-provoking book with some ideas from innovators trying to build a better tomato. --Publishers Weekly (Check Catalog)

The cut : a novel

 by George P. Pelecanos. Pelecanos' last few stand-alone novels have been more about working-class lives in Washington, D.C., than about the crime and criminals that so often surround those lives. This time, though, he's back in the wheelhouse of his early work, with the first novel in what will be a series about Spero Lucas, an Iraqi War vet and a young man with appetites, who has carved for himself a Travis McGee-like career of recovering stolen property, from which he takes a 40 percent cut. This time he's working for a marijuana dealer whose deliveries are disappearing before the packages can be opened. Spero wouldn't work for a heroin dealer, but he has no beef with weed, so takes the gig. Before long, though, he's uncovered a labyrinth of betrayal and counterbetrayal that could endanger people he cares about deeply. Pelecanos' characters often speak of their love of classic westerns, and there have been more than a few showdowns at the O.K. Corral in his best work. We can feel another one coming here, too, as Spero methodically oils guns and lays plans for the inevitable confrontation. His blood ticked electric through his veins. The feeling was familiar and right. Yes, indeed. Familar and right for Spero and also for Pelecanos' fans. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

I'm feeling lucky : the confessions of Google employee number 59

 by Douglas Edwards.  In 1999, Edwards left his stable marketing position at the San Jose Mercury News to take a pay cut and a chance on an upstart Internet company called Google. Although his previous company was a highly structured organization, with measured decisions made by committee around a boardroom table with the publisher presiding, the founders of Google took a radically different approach, treating all employees as equals and giving them free reign to solve problems creatively on their own. Google partners Larry Page and Sergey Brin took their engineering vision to the extreme, valuing perfection and efficiency over marketing hype with their motto, Don't be evil. Although there have been many journalistic examinations of the world's most valuable Internet brand, this is the first to capture the process and the feeling of what it was like to be there in the early days. Edwards describes living the dream on a day-to-day basis and describes many of the key players who created the Google search engine: their roles,personalities, and the mix of camaraderie and cutthroat competition at the company. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

Scales of retribution

 by Cora Harrison. When the fiercely independent kingdoms of western Ireland are threatened by the earl of Kildare, an agent of Henry VIII, King Turlough of the Burren rounds up a group of friends unwilling to accept English rule. Leaving his wife, Brehon Mara, to preside over his kingdom is not normally a risky proposition, given the fact that she is the only female Brehon (judge and investigating magistrate) in Ireland. Mara is, however, currently heavy with child. Experiencing premature labor, she summons Malachy the physician, but he is nowhere to be found. After giving birth to a healthy son, Mara learns that Malachy has been poisoned, and suspects abound. Determined to bring the culprit to justice, Mara expands her investigation, endangering the life of her infant son in the process. Harrison, like Peter Tremayne in his Sister Fidelma series, provides a superior brand of historical mystery that underscores the uniquely independent position of women in medieval and early Renaissance Ireland. --Booklist (Check catalog)

Cabin fever : a suburban father's search for the wild

 by Tom Montgomery-Fate. Fate, the author of four previous books and an essayist whose work appears on National Public Radio and in diverse newspapers and magazines, debates his mentor, Henry David Thoreau, in a sequence of inquiring, superbly constructed essays. As Thoreau does in Walden, Fate encapsulates a year's worth of experiences and reflections, but his musings are anchored to not only the cabin he builds in southwest Michigan but also the suburban Chicago home he shares with his wife and three children. An English professor and a writer, a family man seeking solitude, and a book lover reading by candlelight as his computer slumbers, Fate seeks a middle way. The son of a pastor and a seminary graduate, Fate discerns invaluable lessons in living from watching birds and ants at work and his son at play, walking in the woods, sitting with a dying friend, listening to the roar of interstate traffic, and contemplating the lives of suburban coyotes. His frank, poignant, and funny essays grapple with the quandaries inherent in the effort to live a balanced life. Fate's clarion musings on place, time, family, social responsibility, the wild, and the civilized are thoughtful and affecting in their revelations of how complex and precious life is. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

The Buddha in the attic

 by Julie Otsuka.  Otsuka's stunning debut, When the Emperor Was Divine (2002), a concentrated novel about the WWII internment of Japanese Americans, garnered the Asian American Literary Award, the ALA Alex Award, and a Guggenheim. Her second novel tells the stories of Japanese mail-order brides at the start of the twentieth century in a first-person-plural narrative voice, the choral we. This creates an incantatory and haunting group portrait of diverse women who make the arduous ocean journey to California buoyant with hope only to marry strangers nothing like the handsome young men in the photographs that lured them so far from home. Prejudice and hardship soon transform the brides into fingers-worked-to-the-bone laborers, toiling endlessly as domestic workers, farmers, prostitutes, and merchants. Every aspect of female life is candidly broached in Otsuka's concise yet grandly dramatic saga as these determined, self-sacrificing outsiders navigate the white water of American society, only to watch their American-born children disdain all things Japanese. Drawing on extensive research and profoundly identifying with her characters, Otsuka crafts an intricately detailed folding screen depicting nearly five decades of change as the women painstakingly build meaningful lives, only to lose everything after Pearl Harbor. This lyrically distilled and caustically ironic story of exile, effort, and hate is entrancing, appalling, and heartbreakingly beautiful. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

American dreamers : how the left changed a nation

 by Michael Kazin. The most enduring impact of the radical Left can be found not as much in American politics as in American culture, Kazin says. He traces leftist reform in movements from abolitionism to feminism, the labor movement, and socialism, looking at issues from racial and sexual equality to sexual pleasure outside of marriage as he documents the Left's influence on the American sense of altruism. He begins by examining the abolitionist movement and its effect on the later civil rights movement. Later, he focuses on labor issues and socialism, communism and the anti-Communist movement, and how the Old Left morphed into the New Left. Profiling major figures, he recounts the socialist sensibilities of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Horace Greeley. He makes no claim that this is a comprehensive examination of the Left in the U.S. but affords a fascinating inspection of the convergence of ideals of individual freedom and communal responsibility ideals often in conflict in American politics and how that convergence has influenced American politics and culture for generations. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

Maid to match

  by Deeanne Gist. Tillie Reese, a bright young woman hindered by the extreme poverty in the mountains of New York, gets the job of her dreams a position as a housemaid in George Vanderbilt's Biltmore Estate. Surrounded by beauty and opulence, Tillie doesn't mind the physical demands of being a servant. Meanwhile, Mack Danver will do anything to save money so he can get his sister out of the school for orphans. His twin brother, Earl, is a footman for the Vanderbilts, and when Mrs. Vanderbilt sees Mack, she decides to make the handsome brothers a matched set. Although well read, Mack is a mountain man at heart, and he hates being at the beck and call of the privileged upper class. However, the need to save his sister trumps his distaste. Then it's love at first sight for Mack and Tillie, but rules against the help dating each other make Tillie fight her attraction with all the strength she can muster. Gist's snapshot of the lives of late-nineteenth-century servants is rich in detail, and readers will root for Gist's characters as they face one difficult situation after another with courage and faith. Another crowd-pleaser from this popular author. --Booklist. (Check Catalog)

The legacy : an elder's vision for our sustainable future

 by David T. Suzuki. In 2009, Suzuki (Dodging the Toxic Bullet), an internationally recognized geneticist and environmentalist now in his 70's, gave a legacy lecture at the University of British Columbia where he had been a professor for 39 years. His is an optimistic vision of the future, even though we are despoiling our natural environment at a rapid pace as if as a species we were "immune to the laws of nature." Rachel Carson's 1962 book, Silent Spring, inspired environmentalists such as Suzuki to become active on a number of issues, but looking back he believes that environmentalists have not sufficiently addressed the root causes of our species' destructiveness: our failure to recognize our spiritual dependence upon nature that "gave us birth and is our home and source of well being" and to which we will return when we die. Suzuki sees the magnitude of the present crisis as a transformative opportunity to reject those who claim that protecting the environment is unrealistic, or fiscally irresponsible, and find ways to "and to create a future rich in the joy, happiness, and meaning that are our real wealth." A small book with a big, generous message. --Publishers Weekly (Check Catalog)